New Email Format

I don't know about anyone else but I quite liked being able to read the post on the email. Although it is nice to have a better designed email I would prefer to have the text on the post on it. I am sure it wouldn't be hard. Please let me know what you all think.

#1 - DaniWeb revenue is generated when people visit the actual site and see the advertisemens.
#2 - When people are reading a message via email, they read it and then go on to the next email in their inbox. When people are reading the message on the site, they are much more likely to start replying, surf other pages on DaniWeb, and it just makes things a whole lot more sticky.
#3 - A *very* large handful of users everyday were replying to the posts by replying to the email instead of on the site. I even tried putting a big notice in the emails to no avail. As you can imagine, this lead to dozens of emails in my inbox daily filled with good posts, but I was the only person who got to see them. Forcing the users to the site eliminates this growing problem.

#1 - DaniWeb revenue is generated when people visit the actual site and see the advertisemens.

I though this was supposed to be a community not a business. You are supposed to be supplying a service to people and the way people normally change services for the better!

#2 - When people are reading a message via email, they read it and then go on to the next email in their inbox. When people are reading the message on the site, they are much more likely to start replying, surf other pages on DaniWeb, and it just makes things a whole lot more sticky.

I have definately done that with your emails but if there was something I actually wanted to reply to I would always click the link. Why make people click on a link to find something like

Agreed on all fronts.

There is no reason for me to reply to this, I would have wanted to reply to your thread. There are endless amounts of posts on this forum that just say, "I agree" or "yes thats right".

#3 - A *very* large handful of users everyday were replying to the posts by replying to the email instead of on the site. I even tried putting a big notice in the emails to no avail. As you can imagine, this lead to dozens of emails in my inbox daily filled with good posts, but I was the only person who got to see them. Forcing the users to the site eliminates this growing problem.

I understand obviously that you might have this happen but surely this is a minor problem and could be resolved by some kind of auto delete function in your mail box or even on your server. Also, isn't there a way of making emails "not repliable"?

I hope you can take these thoughts into account and I hope you don't think I am being to harsh.

DaniWeb is a community, but it still costs money to operate. Without the business angle there would be no community, such is the way of the world.

Remember that DaniWeb is totally free from the user perspective, whereas many similar IT support communities will charge a membership fee or only provide help on a pay as you go basis.

Personally I am much happier making the odd commercial sacrifice in order to keep the system free of charge, than going down the road of paid memberships only.

I agree that in an ideal world there would be no site ads, forum posts would be emailed in full to anyone who didn't want to participate, yada yada yada. But for all the above reasons, it ain't an ideal world :)

> I though this was supposed to be a community not a business. You are supposed to be supplying a service to people and the way people normally change services for the better!

When emails are sent out and people read them without visiting DaniWeb each time, no money is made. But you are forgetting that it takes a lot of server power and resources and money TO send out the emails. It's impractical to spend thousands of dollars to send out emails to hundreds of thousands of users daily and not make any money back on those emails.

> I understand obviously that you might have this happen but surely this is a minor problem

If you count roughly 50 emails a day a minor problem. Especially when that is 50 people a day whose posts are falling into the oblivion that is my mail inbox instead of in the forums where they can be seen. And 50 people a day who become frustrated because they don't understand our system. And 50 fewer threads a day that get answered. And the problem will only get worse as we grow ...

>And 50 fewer threads a day that get answered. And the problem will only get worse as we grow ...

That is extremely unlikely because to recieve an email about a thread you must have already posted in it once!

I do honestly totally understand that you have to make money out of this and I am very glad that it is a completely free service. However, I also understand that people post for you for free! Which really means that as well as you being the "producer" of this community most of the posts are answered by members;)

If you wouldn't mind I would like to know after a couple of months whether you have noticed an increase in ad clicks and by what percentage, I am obviously not asking for anything specific.

> That is extremely unlikely because to recieve an email about a thread you must have already posted in it once!
Oops :) But you get the idea. People post replies that often include their own questions which then go unanswered, is what I meant to say.

> If you wouldn't mind I would like to know after a couple of months whether you have noticed an increase in ad clicks
Revenue is generated when ads are simply viewed as well. The click that it takes to go from the email to the thread you got an email about helps to fund the cost of sending out that email.

... unless you mean is there a dramatic increase in the number of users who visit the forum after receiving emails with previews versus without them? If that's the question, I can say from past experience it is over tenfold.

:eek: Good god, ten fold? Really that is amazing. Fair enough if it is that much. How about this then. Is there a way to maybe have the feature of emailing the post itself after the user has reached a certain amount of posts, there is an incentive for users to post more to get a better service. Of course this is probably really quite hard to do now i have thought about it but it could well be something you should keep in mind.